Living Room (2 page)

Philip Hartman, son of immigrants, might as well have been an immigrant himself, brought up in a world that was totally Jewish. You lived in the neighborhood in which you were born, you went to a neighborhood school, you dated Jewish girls from the neighborhood because you didn’t want to upset your parents, and you watched a friend here and there make it to City College or even Wisconsin or Berkeley (“foreigners they became”), you took piano lessons but not for long because your parents never could afford a piano and practice became a daily hassle, and you did what your father did unless you wanted to become a doctor or dentist, which Philip Hartman had not. And so he had married Rosalie, whose mother was a friend of Philip’s mother, and Philip went to work in his father’s cubbyhole jewelry manufacturing shop (shop? “Poppa, it’s a closet! there isn’t room for both of us!”), an artisan of sorts, hitting his stride just as the Depression eroded all interest in jewelry, and he settled for a life of making do, forbidding himself and Rosalie the luxury of children until now when it was almost too late.

In the hospital, pacing, he thought that the son Rosalie was bearing would not be a future soldier, there would be no more wars after this one, this son, instead, would be his liberation, his salvation, his ticket to
move,
to a new neighborhood, maybe a new line of business, something different, a breaking out. When the obstetrician told him it was a daughter, he said, “That’s nice,” but what he felt was, “You son-of-a-bitch doctor, shove it back in and pull out a boy, I’m too old for jokes.”

Philip Hartman’s smashed quest for a male heir, though there was nothing to inherit except the name, led him to rationalize his fierce want by suggesting that at a time when the Jews of the world had their numbers decimated by the barbarians, the least the Hartmans could do was to reproduce their number by having one more child. But Mrs. Hartman’s obstetrician forbade it; there had been complications at Shirley’s birth of a kind that increased with a mother’s age, and he felt a further pregnancy would be unwise and possibly dangerous. Dr. Niemeyer concurred in that judgment. A cabal of doctors defeated Philip Hartman’s one wish.

From that moment on, Hartman, who did not know that Gentiles also have guilty consciences, took to envying them because he thought the Puritan conscience
made Gentiles feel bad only about
things they did that they knew to be wrong, or things that they said that they knew to be wrong, and the bane of his existence was that he felt badly about things that he
thought.
His utter frustration at Rosalie producing in middle age an only child that was a girl!—and, even more, his rage at God, who deserved the neglect he was getting from socialists and others, for permitting this injustice, consumed him for months until he would allow himself to notice that Shirley was really a pretty baby, and what was more important to any Jew in his right mind, very bright. He began to feel the pulse of hope once more.

True, his hope was that this quick-learning, attractive baby girl would grow up to snag an Einstein at least, an Einstein that would be a male child once removed. By the time Shirley was three and her genius should have been evident to all the neighbors, Hartman knew that she would bring him pride, skipping classes, getting straight A’s, the school valedictorian, scholarships, fellowships, Guggenheims, Pulitzer, maybe one day a Nobel prize. An Einstein was no longer good enough for her, Einstein may have been a genius with a blackboard but was clearly a naive nincompoop about earthly justice.

“What do you want for your three-year-old princess,” said Rosalie, “a King Solomon?” She turned to Shirley and said, “Sweetheart, you come up to his
pupik
and already he thinks Einstein isn’t smart enough for you, the Jewish justices on the Supreme Court are too old. Listen to your mother, not to him.”

“You’re so smart,” said Philip Hartman. “Where are the young Cardozos and Brandeises and Frankfurters?”

“For a three-year-old? Shirley, close your ears, your father is having hallucinations!”

Hartman, bending, put his hands on Shirley’s arms, and said, “I am right to be worried about you. American Jews are becoming
goyim,
politicians, big businessmen, impossible people!”

Rosalie took his hands off Shirley and lifted the child up in her arms. “She’s too young,” she said. Then in Shirley’s ear whispered, “If you listen to me and not that
meshugener
for the rest of your life, you’ll be all right.”

Shirley understood little, only that she should stop being the cause of their quarrel.

Fate tricked Philip Hartman twice. First the boy was Shirley. And then, when Shirley was seven, Rosalie announced that she had to go for a curettage, and then after the curettage for a hysterectomy, and then they tried to explain to Philip Hartman that the hysterectomy was too late and that he would have to bring up his only child alone. For four days he did not shave, an expression of ultimate self-disgust, and then on the fifth day, he went in to shave and smashed his shaving cup into the bathroom mirror, shattering both, and he turned to see the little girl standing at the bathroom door frightened at the broken glass and her father crying and he picked her up in his arms and said, “Shirley, Shirley, it’ll be all right.”

It was only when he picked her up that Philip Hartman realized that Shirley had a fever. How long had she had it? Had he in his clumsiness and total unpreparedness for the role of father-mother dressed her inadequately for that terrible day when, against all the advice of friends and relatives, he took his seven-year-old to the cemetery in the rain to see the wooden crate holding her mother being lowered into the mud? What kind of insanity had made him impress the indignity of death into the child’s mind?

Frantically he searched for a thermometer in the medicine cabinet, the night table, the kitchen drawer among the spoons and knives, and finally found it in Rosalie’s sewing basket among the spools of thread that now would never be used.

Shirley held the thermometer between closed lips for the requisite three minutes. It registered 104 degrees. Hartman refused to believe, shook it down and made Shirley hold it between her lips again, dismissing this joke of God’s, but it was no joke, it was still 104 degrees! Was his daughter going to be taken away in the very week that his wife died? Did that bastard Jehovah think he could play Job with Philip Hartman? You pushed Philip Hartman only so far. The girl would live or God would die!

And so he put Shirley to bed, covered her over with every blanket in the house because though her skin was hot to the touch she was shivering. He phoned the doctor’s office and got the hopeless answering service. He called the doctor’s home number and urged his wife to try to track the doctor down. An hour and a half they waited for Niemeyer to arrive, every minute an agony not only for Philip Hartman but for Shirley, who read the terror in her father’s face as a sure sign. If as her father said millions of Jews had died in Europe, why should a Jew anywhere be spared?

Dr. Niemeyer came in breathless from the stairs, apologizing for being late, he had a patient who was dying—undoubtedly Jewish, thought Hartman, another one gone or going.

The doctor put down his black crackle-leather bag, took one look at Shirley, a small vessel nearly hidden under the covers, and exploded at Hartman as he flung the offending covers to the floor. What did he mean smothering the child in blankets? With a fever that high a mere sheet would do, a child should be cool, was he trying to bring an early end to his own daughter?

Niemeyer stopped his accusations when he noticed Shirley gathering the top of the sheet around her face to stifle the sobbing. The doctor shushed her from the left side of the bed and Hartman, defeated, patted her head from the other side till Shirley’s chest-deep sobs came less and less frequently and she was able to respond to the doctor’s questions.

Was she spitting up blood? Did she have diarrhea? The questions, to which she shook her head vigorously, started her crying again, and Hartman had to restrain his anger at Dr. Niemeyer.

The doctor probed Shirley’s abdomen with a gentle hand. He pressed here and there, then here again, until he raised his head. The locus of the pain was in the same place that her mother had first felt the pain that eventually killed her.

In the other room, out of Shirley’s earshot, Dr. Niemeyer said, “Hartman, this could be a reaction to her mother’s death, but I’m puzzled. Could a fever of a hundred and four be psychosomatic?”

“You don’t know?” asked Hartman.

“I don’t know,” the doctor admitted.

“How many years since medical school are you taking dollars from your patients because of some superior knowledge and now, when I need you for the first time since I buried my wife, you say you don’t know?”

And so a specialist was called.

He charged fifty dollars, a fortune for those days.

He could find nothing.

“
Ech mir
a specialist,” was Hartman’s conclusion. “Doctors are not a profession, it’s a club full of guessers.”

Eventually, as Philip Hartman saw it, God relented. First, Shirley’s fever subsided. Then the pain, psychosomatic or not, faded away.

But Shirley would not leave her bed. Hartman pleaded with her. She was missing school. She was well, he could see that. He accused her of having the devil with her in her bed, certainly a serious charge against a child of eight.

To herself, Shirley confided that although she did not feel her old self, it was a borderline case; she could either get up, or not. But the hazards of the outside world being what they were, the chances of catching death so great, whether from another child in school or from Hitler or getting hit by a car while daydreaming, it was better to stay put. Besides, in the previous year she had begun to read books and the days in bed, now that her pain was gone, were a train of borrowed experiences, books from the library that her father fetched her, used paperbacks he bought her for ten cents down on Canal Street—romantic novels, mysteries, science fiction, she read it all.

“You’ll be a permanent cripple!” said Hartman one Sunday.

Shirley accused him with silence.

The next day, dragging his guilt like a sack full of stones, he brought her some atonement from the library.

Hartman could not stay away from work. Dashing to his shop, hurrying home to see how Shirley was, dashing back, losing weight, losing self-control, finally he got Mrs. Bialek to come and care for Shirley five days a week.

In the morning when her father would be giving Mrs. Bialek her special instructions, a list of groceries to put in for the weekend or how to get the usually drunk janitor to fix the leaky washbasin, Mrs. Bialek would listen to him, one hand on a hip, in a way that seemed to Shirley a bit familiar, a seductive stance that was unfair to a man who needed to rush away to work, especially since there was presumably, somewhere, a Mr. Bialek for whom her hand-on-hip pose should be kept.

One evening Shirley referred to her as “Mrs. Houseworker.” Philip Hartman said, “Never call her that! Mrs. Bialek is doing us a great favor by coming here every day!”

“You pay her,” said Shirley.

“Pay is not the basis of human relations,” he told his daughter, who understood only that the witchcraft of Mrs. Bialek’s special way of standing and talking was a bad influence on her father.

Then there was the inevitable visit from a truant officer, who looked at Shirley with eyes almost closed, sharp-visioned, to see if he could with insight determine what Dr. Niemeyer could not.

“Would you like to go back to school?” he finally asked her.

“You bet,” she lied.

He wrote something in his notebook, satisfied.

The next visit was from her homeroom teacher, Mrs. Smetley, who gave her assignments to memorize. It was so easy for her, Shirley began to have her doubts about the process of education, a ritual to satisfy the government, her father, Mrs. Smetley, the truant officer, but her—not for an instant!

In the evenings, Hartman, tired and worried about his bright little girl who refused to leave her bed, talked to her, held her hand, fed her the broth and vegetables that Mrs. Bialek had prepared, wondered about the mystery of her illness. On Friday evening, in
shul
,
he questioned God. Was he missing a cue?
What
was his responsibility?
Rosalie, Rosalie,
he thought,
please come back if only for an hour, you’ll know what to do.

Hartman decided that he would read to Shirley each night out of the Old Testament, a book that gave him comfort because of its familiarity. The stories alarmed Shirley and brought on dreams and nightmares.

One night she awoke from a garbled nightmare, a patchwork of scenes and characters from the stories her father had read to her, and in the dark, her eyes open, she imagined Moses coming down from the mountain, not the huge, bearded, angry father she had always thought of him as, but as her mother Rosalie, gowned in a robe of colors Joseph would have envied, a diadem gracing her hair, and when her mother found the people dancing around the golden calf, she did not smash the tablets she was carrying, full of advice, but brought understanding to the passing weakness of the godless celebrants, talking to them in gentle commandments. Suddenly, Shirley imagined her mother removing her splendid robe and instead of her mother’s stoutness under the robe, it was an eight-year-old girl, herself, standing there naked. The people had all stopped what they were doing, looking at her, the men and women alike, and when they were quiet, she spoke with wisdom somehow learned from her mother, and from her father’s reading to her, and from some knowledge that seemed to have been with her since birth, and she knew it was her responsibility, this mission to lure the attention of the people away from their false gods.